1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally pertains to the field of electronic commerce and the merging of technology and personal services.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is traditionally practiced using a Web browser running on a personal computer (PC) connected to the Internet. Although online goods and services providers can offer attractive, practical, efficient and reliable e-commerce via the Internet, a typical end-to-end e-commerce transaction can take several minutes to complete.
Moreover, existing e-commerce methods can leave the consumer wondering whether the online transaction was successfully completed. At times, the consumer may not be certain that the online transaction was successfully completed until the goods actually show up at the door. A good practice is for the e-commerce provider to send an acknowledgment of the consumer's order by email, the email containing all of the details needed to allow the user to check the current status of the order. E-commerce sites such as Amazon.com have refined the process in order to provide an excellent quality of service that almost everyone has come appreciate and trust. For example, the “1-click” purchase model patented by Amazon.com considerably speeds up the purchase of items for already registered users, and the user need not wait online for a confirmation that the credit card payment was accepted. Moreover, easy account access allows the user to check the status of a pending order and the status of the delivery. Every change made either by the user or by the provider is automatically acknowledged in an email message posted to the user.
Removing the issue of bad or non-payment, such a transactional model for executing an online transaction is essentially biased in favor of the provider, in that the provider always knows whether the purchase request is valid or is invalid. In contrast, the shopper may have doubts as to the success of his or her purchase request until such time as an explicit acknowledgment is provided, which may not occur until a quite a significant time after the online order has been submitted. Typically, the acknowledgment is supplied as a displayed message, a printed receipt or an email. This is because e-commerce servers are not optimized to provide an instantaneous acknowledgment, especially when a clearing bank is involved in validating a credit card purchase.
Consequently, because of the lack of a reliable, speedy and trusted e-commerce transactional model, consumer-oriented Internet appliances optimized to carry out e-commerce are quasi-inexistent.